Are social and entrepreneurial attitudes compatible? : a behavioral and self-perceptional analysis

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to analyze the compatibility between entrepreneurial and social attitudes. Specifically, it seeks to analyze whether subjects with a more developed economic entrepreneurial attitude exhibit a less social attitude. Design/methodology/approach: The methodology integrates an economic experimental approach with a standard entrepreneurial intention questionnaire to analyze the interaction between entrepreneurial and social self‐perceptions and behavior. Findings: There is empirical evidence that experimental entrepreneurial behavior (characterized by detecting an opportunity and accepting risk to take an economic advantage from it in laboratory experiments) reduces the incentive for social behavior. However, this effect does not appear if just self‐perceptions instead of experimental behaviors are considered. Research limitations/implications: The social attitude of entrepreneurs may be overestimated in those empirical research studies based only on data obtained from entrepreneurs' answers to hypothetical questions in a survey. Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper presenting a laboratory experiment to represent the key features of entrepreneurial behavior instead of a case‐control analysis to set differences in the experimental behavior of sub‐samples of subjects defined in terms of their entrepreneurial motivation or experience.